Language Acquisition: Rationalist and Empiricist Theories

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the fierce debate between the rationalist and the empiricist theorists on the issue of language acquisition which has captured the imagination of the linguistic world for decades. It looks at how although the rationalists' concept of specific language mechanisms in the brain has prevailed for many years, new research by connectionist theorists has tilted the balance towards the empiricists' approach. It provides a detailed comparative analysis of these two competing approaches and explores their application in children's discourse to assess their validity. It also discusses the work by the connectionist theorists and the implications on the future of linguistic research in the area of first language acquisition.

From the Paper:

"In Chomsky's (1972) original conception, the mind of children is analogized to a black box called the "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD). This box contains all linguistic principles that do not derive from the interaction with the environment. In Chomsky's (1981) "Principles-and-Parameters Theory" and his subsequent work, his version of how children utilize their linguistic knowledge to acquire language in their specific environments is presented. Before their interaction with the environment, children possess an "universal grammar." With exposure to specific linguistic environments, all children need to do is to set the switches on certain parameters that correspond to their language (in Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996, pp. 31-2)."

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